In
shoot 'em up games, small
sprites that either follow your ship's actions, or stay in a fixed position relative to your ship, equipped with a similar weapon, and fire at the same time. This allows you to do dammage over a wider area, or (if the game permits this) you can arrange the options in a tight cluster by describing a circle with your ship, which concentrates the
firepower of the ship and options on a single target.
They're called lots of things in different games (eg, bits in R-Type, sprites in Super Aleste, etc), but to make life easier for reviewers, there's a convention of calling them 'options', since that's what they were named in Gradius, the game that made them an obligatory feature in shmups.
See also: droid, power-up.